• January 8, 2008

27 Mobile has launched "Johnny27," a text answering service, where mobile users can send their questions to 272727 and have them answered within three to five minutes via text.

New York-based 27 Mobile charges roughly $2 to answer each question. Subjects of questions can be anything from the practical to the random.

The announcement comes on the heels of people-powered search engine ChaCha's full-scale rollout of its free (and currently ad-free) textChaCha mobile Q&A service, as well as overall increased focus on SMS answers from free directory assistance services like GOOG-411 and 1-800-FREE-411. So it raises the question of whether users will pay a fee for a text-based answering service on top of their standard text-messaging charges--in exchange for getting answers sans ads.

--Tameka Kee